The day of Ratna’s funeral (Final Part)

Before throwing the last shovels of dirt onto the coffin we once more said our good byes. When my turn came I stood dumbly feeling the heat melting me.  I prayed to Ratna and promised I would never forget her smile, how she had been the joy and the light every time I was at the home helping the nuns.  Lost in remembering all that she who could not even move had done to fill up my empty life, my constant on the run existence, my perpetual motion to keep me from seeing the shallowness of my life, keep me from admitting how selfishly depressed I was because my desires were unfulfilled I experienced an epiphany.  I saw how self-centered I was, how focused on my own goals I was, how, yes, I certainly did service work but what was I doing to help myself.  I asked my Guru to forgive my behavior and I knew that Ratna, in some way, was helping me.

I moved away from the coffin and the rest of the soil was placed on it.  The burial was over.  Most ineffable though—my headache was gone and my dullness too.  I didn’t feel sick anymore.  I was whole once again.  Where had the missing part of me been?  It had become the witness, “She who watches,” and it had dissociated from the dream of life to be in the presence of God so that I could come back renewed and restored.

“She who watches,” what the Warm Springs Oregon indigenous people called the unseen force who sees all and explains all when the time is right, came to me with  the perfect ending to Holy Ratna’s story.  It happened on an ordinary Sunday at the Jyothi Seva Home.  Wanda approached the communion rail to receive the round white wafer that is a symbol for receiving God.  When the wafer was placed on her tongue by the priest and she swallowed it, she stood up from the kneeler and swooned.  She fell to the ground as if she had fainted.  Sister Agata ran up to help.  Wanda opened her eyes.  “I can see she said softly.  I can see.”

The Mother superior and the other nuns thought that maybe the strain of Wanda’s new life as a round the clock mother to her adopted daughter was too much.  They did their own tests trying to disprove that Wanda could see. But she did seem to pass each test.  Finally they took Wanda to her own eye doctor, the one who said that she would be blind for life.  Like the doctor who had diagnosed her when she was 10 and lost her vision, the Bengaluru doctor examined her very carefully.  He kept nodding his head in disbelief.  He did all the necessary eye examinations and finally reported.  “Nothing, absolutely nothing has changed with her eyes.  According to the tests she is as blind as she ever was.

“But there is no doubt that Wanda can now see.”  A hush fell over the room, the kind of hush we feel when we know angels are hovering.  Wanda smiled her bright Polish smile as dazzling as the summer sunlight on the fields outside of Warsaw.  “I told you I could see,” she said.

Of course, we do not read about miracles in the news much.  It seems the angels prefer the hush.  But when I learned about what happened to Wanda I remembered that in order for a person to be judged a saint, at least in the Catholic Tradition, the person prayed to had to grant a miracle to prove prayers were answered.

Later, I asked Wanda, Did you ask Ratna to help you.  Did you pray to her?’

“Yes I did,” Wanda said.  “I asked her to help me be a good mother, always.”

Saints, mothers, and nuns…..miracle workers every one.

The day of Ratna’s funeral (Concluding Part 2)

The hearse that was waiting outside the Home was the black city van that we had used to bring Ratna’s body back from the hospital just a couple of days ago.  The driver was the same driver and now there was an attendant with him.  Kaleem, who had been present at the funeral Mass, got the rickshaw ready to drive us to the cemetery.  But I decided I wanted to ride with Sister Agata and the children with Ratna’s body in the van.  I climbed in and the van attendant closed the back door.  We were all jammed inside and the children were amazingly happy.  

Sister Agata led them in several songs, one of them, Ratna’s favorite, “When You’re Happy.”  I found myself singing along too and going through the various motions, “When you’re happy and you know it, stamp your feet.  When you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands…”  Even I felt it was an odd thing to be doing inside a Bengaluru city death van and I realized this was definitely some kind of historic moment—a spiritual breakthrough of some sort, maybe. But my panic would not dissolve entirely.

At the cemetery, we walked through un-mowed grass which came up to the tops of some of the children’s heads.  The goats used for eating up the grass had not visited this side of the cemetery for a good long time. When they saw the groups of children tramping along purposefully, the goats began to bleat and they came scampering towards us.  This delighted the children who reached out to pet them.

The closer I got to the open grave, the dizzier I became.  I was the first one standing at the edge of the dug out earth.  I could see, immediately, that the hole was not big enough.  The little casket was not going to fit.  Right away I had the angry thought that these sorts of mistakes happen more frequently than not in India.  Idiots, I puttered aloud!  Then I had to forgive myself for such hateful thinking.

Soon the nuns arrived with Kaleem and they understood my dismay.  How would the whole thing be rectified?  Meantime, Ratna’s body was in its fourth day out of the morgue refrigerator in the unrelenting heat of Bengaluru.  I shudder at the thought.  She must be buried quickly.

In those days we still did not have cell phones so Kaleem was sent to find a grave digger or someone in charge.  After standing in the heat long enough to realize there was no drinking water or toilet facilities, I just sighed.  Amazingly Kaleem returned with two men who both had shovels and the rest of the grave was dug out after a few trips back and forth to the van to see the size of the coffin again.

These same men carried the coffin through the sharp, scraggily grass and the goats bleated as if they were also sad.  By now the children had lost their zip and they were silent as the coffin was lowered into the shallow grave and the priest murmured prayers that I, for one, could not hear.

……to be continued in Final Part of Ratna Series.

The day of Ratna’s funeral (Concluding Part 1)

I woke up on the day of Ratna’s funeral feeling very strange.  It was like a little bit hung over and a large bit disoriented.  I knew where I was, in the guest room of the Jyothi Seva Home for Blind Children.  But it was as if another part of me was somewhere else.  Where was that, though? Later I was to find out.

 As I washed and dressed I tried to pull the missing piece of me back from where it had gone. At breakfast I gulped down several strong coffees I had brewed myself hoping to get the fuzz off my brain.

I was still only about 40 percent when the priest arrived and performed the funeral Mass. The nuns and the children and a few guests were crying.  Earlier the children had gone, one by one, up to Ratna’s body, lying in the coffin, and they touched it all over, feeling and seeing her death with their finger tips, absorbing the finality of it.  Each child had placed a flower in the coffin as a good-bye gesture. 

A young Polish woman, Wanda, who worked with the nuns and helped at the home mostly doing all the computer work, though she herself was blind, also walked slowly up to Ratna’s coffin for her last farewell.  Wanda was carrying an Indian baby, a blind dustbin baby girl that she had gotten from Mother Teresa’s home in Kolkata. 

Wanda wanted to raise the child herself and she wanted to adopt her. However, she was refused at first because of her disability and because she was unmarried.  Wanda’s prayers intensified as did the prayers of the nuns. The Jyothi Seva Home children also prayed.  After some time, Wanda received notice that she could adopt the baby since India has a special rule that people who are alone and handicapped are allowed to adopt a child.  It seemed a miracle—a huge boon.  At the time everyone agreed that it was the Grace of God that allowed for the happy union.  

So, there was the official mother carrying her baby daughter up to the coffin. Wanda took the baby’s hand, bent over Ratna’s body, and ran the hand across Ratna’s face. The tears of the children were rolling down like rain. My own eyes flooded and my vision was blurred. 

I sat on the chapel floor with the others but did not feel a part of the group. Outside the windows the sun was bright.  I could hear a variety of birds singing in the trees along with all the sounds of hectic Venkateshpuram going about the work of the day.  Suddenly, I wondered if I might be going to die myself, feeling so out-of-body, so nauseous, and now my head had begun to really throb. The scent from the flowers which would have ordinarily pleased me seemed to make the tiny chapel even tinier. I was sweating profusely and gasping for air.

Then it struck—a huge attack of panic. But why?  I let my body rock with terror. I clutched my blue-sapphire stone that hung from my gold neck chain tightly in my right hand. This was supposed to be my astrological gem, for protection.  Of course, I was praying to my Guru, Sathya Sai Baba. I did not want to keel over and die right in the middle of somebody else’s funeral. Gradually, the attack abated and before long we were on our way to the cemetery. I was still feeling wobbly and frightened, but I could function. To be continued

……to be continued in next Concluding Part 2 of Ratna Series.

Bringing Ratna’s coffin to the Jyothi Seva Home

                                             Nothing is permanent.

The words repeat in my head. Not even my sadness at Ratna’s quick exit into The Safe Place can last.  I’m suddenly giddy with suppressed laughter. What will Kaleem think if I just burst out with it?  The sight of his rickshaw scooting through the streets on our way to the Jyothi Seva home in Venkateshpuram is causing heads to turn.  We look like a little black and yellow plane, or a huge flying bug with a single Cyclops’s Eye (that third-Eye again) lighting up the grimy night. 

He’s at the helm; I’m in the passenger seat balancing the coffin on my lap, its head and foot sticking out considerably on each side.  At first the people just have a quick glance; then, when they realize what they’ve just seen, a rickshaw with a coffin sticking out on two sides of the back, they stare in disbelief.  Children are the first to notice.  They burst out laughing.  Finally I do too.  Kaleem smiles at me over his shoulder.  “Looks like airplane, Mama,” he says.

I am eating exhaust fumes as we fly toward the Joythi Seva Home.  Intoxicated and dying my mind separates, dissociates from my body.  It goes to The Safe Place that children being abused, victims being tortured, the starving escape to—beyond duality.  Saints like Holy Little Ratna dwell there, immersed in ecstasy, and from time to time re-enter the world to bring comfort and joy….. 

 I am writing a letter to my daughter Shaila, she who Destiny ripped from me, and who I keep trying to have returned to me. My prayers and actions are like ice in the hot sun.  She continues to reject me.  But from The Safe Place we are united. I am telling her how I am totally addicted to plants, their beauty, and how I want to immerse myself in their effulgence. I was like a wild bee at the flower nurseries each week, I tell her.

In the gardens of her childhood I constructed outside, I planted trees and shrubs and bushes and perennials. Inside, I grew exotic African violets, gloxinias, miniature orange trees, and ferns.  I crowded together clay pots stuffed with pink and salmon and bright red geraniums on the window sills. I believed the devas of the plants would save us.

In the winter I forced daffodils and tulips into bloom, along with piercingly fragrant hyacinths. During the grey and blizzard days of February, I brightened every empty space in the house with forsythia in full bloom, and sometimes I managed to force quince and apple blossoms to open slowly making mystic the mundane. These earthy fragrances mixed with the smell of firewood roaring and hissing in the living room fireplace. I had, in spite of my many duties, time for meditative and reflective moments while you and Lee Michael and baby Gene took afternoon naps. My favorite spot for introspection was in front of that fireplace.

Shaila stares at the letter, unable to comprehend my longing for her to come back home to my heart.  She sighs with boredom.  She does not remember me at all, perhaps.  

Sometimes the dry logs burst loudly, waking the snoozing cats.  But none of us, so cozy in our authentic first home, the salt-box-style nest, could have known then that a mother-killer tornado was just around the corner about to blow our family to bits. 

Now I am left with blind orphans, nuns who see me as an instrument of God, a rickshaw driver who does not know of this other world where I tread water constantly, trying not to sink into Hell.

When we arrive at the home, it’s very late.  Kaleem puts the coffin in the tiny chapel where the funeral Mass will be said in the morning and where the nuns and the blind orphans and some of the neighbors will say their good-byes.  While we were picking up the coffin, Sister Agata and the nuns had prepared Ratna’s body.  I watch as it is brought from the guest-room bed where it had been put into the lovely white-satin dress, the hair combed and held back with a white-satin head band.

 Slowly and solemnly, Sister Agata lowers the body into the coffin which is at the top of the aisle leading to the altar. Sighted persons entering the chapel tomorrow will see Ratna easily, as she faces the doorway, her feet aimed towards the altar.  

.............to be continued in next instalment of Terry’s Words.